Everson

Today (both in class and here) I focused on Brian Evenson’s Internal. At the top of the copy it says “from Contagion. Now, I recently saw the movie Contagion, so this what my mind set going into the story. For those not familiar with this movie (it’s a fairly recent movie that has been out on DVD for a while) it’s basically about how the world would respond to a mass epidemic of near global proportion. The people who get sick die fairly quickly and (obviously) the disease is highly contagious. Looking back between the movie and the short story I’m not sure that they have to do with one another but even then, they do have similarities. I felt that the short story was one depicting a person’s decent into madness. It seemed to be a sort of ‘what you study, you become’ situation.

I definitely thought that the use of italics and quotations was deliberate. Italics seemed to be thoughts about whatever. Quotations seemed much more complex. In some cases it seemed to be sarcastic like on page 55 where it says “hardly the typical intern”. The one line that I think is the most sarcastic is on page 63, “Write nothing,” he said (not his exact words). “The only notebook you need,” he said, tapping me on the temple, “is the ‘notebook’ within your skull.” This particular line also seemed off in another way. If you were to say that to someone, would you tap them on the temple? I wouldn’t. If you were saying it to a mentally unstable person, would you tap them on the temple? I absolutely wouldn’t! (In nursing we’re actually trained to almost never touch a patient). 

I also think the structure of the writing is a symbol of the decent into madness (or further decent into madness). The paragraphs get shorter as you read. A great example of this is on page 62 where the “types” are listed. The first item on the list is “the nervous type”. This seems to be a reasonable personality type. Then at the bottom it has “the Siamese-tarp type”.  I don’t know about you, but I didn’t know tarp is a type. My last comment is on page 69. To me, the section Sharp clearly says that the narrator has become (or always was) mentally disturbed. If you’ve been trained to work with disturbed people you’ll have the tools to deal with patients, so the desire to stab him in the eye is ridiculous. The thought that he’s thinking the same thing is less ridiculous (sometimes you really need to watch your back). Overall, I wasn’t too into the story just because I don’t like stories about mental instability because I have seen too much of it myself already.